What being a gifted kid didn’t teach me about leading schools

Gifted education in the early 1990s felt important, urgent, and slightly covert. Now I’m 40 with a family, four academic degrees, a growing career, and crippling anxiety.

I was born in 1984, which means I came of age during the retooling of gifted education; quietly fueled by residual Cold War urgency and national policy alarms like A Nation at Risk. In the early 1990s, federal attention and funding for gifted education were resurging, thanks to calls for academic excellence and global competitiveness. The passing of the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act in 1988 had brought both research and grant funding to the field.

Being in the gifted program felt like recruitment. We were pulled from class for logic puzzles, abstract reasoning exercises, and timed challenges that seemed designed less for enrichment and more like preparation to crack codes or outwit a Soviet operative. The faster you could solve a math problem, finish a book, or master a Rubik’s cube, the more gifted you were believed to be.